Free Republic

The 48-year-old Interstate 40 bridge between Arkansas and Tennessee was rated as being in “fair” condition with a sufficiency factor of 58% before a “significant” fracture was discovered on May 11. The structure has remained closed to traffic since that time as crews work to repair the damage, first stabilizing the bridge to accommodate the equipment needed and then removing and replacing the damaged portion of a 900-foot structural beam. The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) said a fracture may be caused by overload, shock, fatigue or stress. A critical fracture could lead to collapse, if not properly repaired and...

President Barack Obama released a video on Monday ahead of the 10th anniversary of the signing of Obamacare, celebrating it as “the closest we’ve ever come to universal coverage in America.” In truth, Obamacare expanded access to health insurance, primarily for the working poor, but at a massive cost to middle-class budgets. It also changed American politics for the worse, turning it into a zero-sum game in which compromise is nearly impossible.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The nation's largest legal marijuana market is struggling. Illicit sales continue to thrive. A shaky supply chain has customers looking at barren shelves in some shops. There are testing problems. And a proposal to allow home marijuana deliveries in cities that have banned pot sales could lead to a courtroom fight. A Los Angeles hearing Tuesday provided a window into the state's emerging cannabis economy, in which early enthusiasm for broad legal sales has been followed by anxiety and frustration across a swath of the industry. The state's top marijuana regulator, Lori Ajax, said after the...

**SNIP** Yahoo obtained documents detailing the recruitment methods that former NBA agent Andy Miller and an employee, Christian Dawkins, used to chase potential clients. Payments as high as $73,000 are detailed and current athletes like Duke’s Wendell Carter, Michigan State’s Miles Bridges, Kentucky’s Kevin Knox and Alabama’s Collin Sexton are all listed in those documents. “These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America,” Emmert’s statement read. “Simply put, people who engage in this kind of behavior have no place in college sports. They are an affront...

Conservatives all over social media are concerned that perhaps people like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan, and the usual pack of Democrat-leaning Republicans simply don’t want President Trump to lead any victories–big or small–during his tenure. Forget the Leftists going after President Trump–what could be more diabolical than for members of his own own party to purposely cause chaos in the White House, and to block any/all successes, large or small? Because that’s certainly what seems to be happening. After all, Donald Trump is the ultimate “outsider”, perhaps the cause of extreme resentment for these very unpopular career politicians,...

Many are still seeking to understand this unpredictable president—what he’s accomplished, how he’s failed, and the hard truths both sides refuse to admit. It seems no American is neutral on Donald Trump. The chasm dividing liberals and conservatives grows wider with every tweet and new investigation, only reinforced by partisan media.The public square has been reduced to a shouting match. From music artists to business leaders, many on the Left mandate strict resistance to the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, some on the Right use war imagery to encourage firm loyalty over any criticism of the administration. Yet many are still seeking...

"From the beginning the focus has been on the wrong thing, on the wrong people. The Democrats and Hillary Clinton and the media have concocted a scandal," said Mark Levin as he opened his radio show Friday night. "A scandal that has suggested that Donald Trump and his surrogates were colluding with the Russians during the 2016 election. That is a truly incredible allegation with no facts whatsoever." Now, after coming up short time and time again in proving such a scandal, the Left has used the firing of former FBI director James Comey to ratchet up more accusations. Levin...

This was so good I could keep watching it over and over again. Former Speaker Of the House Newt Gingrich was on his game earlier today as a Fox News guest. The way he takes down Hillary Clinton is a template for anyone else running for a seat this election cycle. She was wrong on Brexit, she was wrong on Libya, she was wrong on the 'reset' with Russia. I mean, what has she been right about? If Hillary Clinton leads this nation's foreign policy, where does that lead our country? Even a blind man can see her failures and...

The Democrats’ socialist candidate for President of the United States, Bernie Sanders, was seriously tripped up this week in an interview with Univision’s León Krauze. When asked to explain the failure of socialist governments in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, Sanders completely clammed up, saying he has an opinion on the subject, but was unwilling to share it, as he is “focused on my campaign.”

The incompetence of the Obama administration has had its shining moments -- the Obamacare rollout, the Benghazi coverup, and Hillary Clinton's email server prominent among them. This month, a New York Times profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has again reminded the American people of the failures of the current president. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said such scandal is the natural result of Barack Obama's staffing choices. This "is what happens when you put van drivers and campaign flaks and failed novelists in charge of foreign policy and national security," he declared. Cotton was barely scratching the surface....

A man masquerading as a member of Congress walked into a secure backstage area without being properly screened and spoke with President Obama at an awards dinner last fall. Five days later, a woman walked backstage unchecked at a gala dinner where Obama was a featured guest. Months after that, two people strolled unnoticed past a Secret Service checkpoint into the first layer of the White House grounds. The incidents were among a half-dozen previously undisclosed security breaches since 2013 that were detailed in an extensive, bipartisan congressional investigation of the inner workings of the Secret Service. In a critical...

Almost ever electronic device made today except some for the military have solder joints that contain no lead. This is an effort to save our groundwater and our public health. The fact that the lead has been generally replaced with silver or bismuth, both of which are actually greater health risks than lead, well we’ll leave that one for Ralph Nader. The longer-term trend is toward all-tin connections, anyway, but they don’t work very well, either. Costs have gone up for computers with lead-free solder, mean time between failures (MTBF) has gone down (in this case down is bad) and...

Bias: President Obama repeatedly claims to know nothing about scandals, blames others for problems and has failed to achieve most of his stated goals. If he were a Republican, what do you think the press would call him? When a reporter asked in a two-part question whether Obama had been "caught by surprise" by the mushrooming scandal at the VA, Obama ignored it. It was a good question. The White House had earlier claimed that Obama only learned about attempts at VA hospitals to falsify records and hide chronic delays after reading about it in the newspaper, despite mounting evidence...

Complete Headline: Michelle Obama Tells Grads: ‘I Could Take Up a Whole Afternoon Talking About’ Barack Obama’s Failures First lady Michelle Obama in her commencement speech at a high school in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday said she could “take up a whole afternoon talking about” her husband’s failures. “And then there’s this guy, Barack Obama, who lost – I could take up a whole afternoon talking about his failures, but – he lost his first race for Congress, and now he gets to call himself my husband,” she told graduates of Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School during commencement...

Health Care: As Democrats grow increasingly worried that ObamaCare will explode on the launch pad just as midterm elections get going, the Obama administration seeks to pin blame on Republicans. Good luck with that. Earlier this week, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she didn't realize how complicated getting ObamaCare off the ground would be. Sebelius complained that "no one fully anticipated" the difficulties involved in implementing ObamaCare, or how confusing it would be with the public. She wasn't talking about the massive and impossible task of imposing central planning on one-sixth of the nation's economy. Instead,...

President Obama's foreign policy has provided many examples of leading from behind. The expression "leading from behind," as used in this article, means: 1. Waiting while allies decide what to do and then following along. Doing that assumes substantial congruity of interest with our allies. To the extent that such congruity may exist at all, it is neither uniform nor perpetual nor consistent. 2. "Leading from behind" also, and of more significance here, means reactive leadership -- waiting for a bad and perhaps irreversible situation to develop and then scrambling to find politically convenient explanations to offer and actions to...

Allen West weighs in on the new 2007 video, mostly saying that he doesn’t believe it is of as much consequence as Benghazi-gate, ballots not getting to our troops overseas, the debt, etc. Those are the things he’s concerned about. When asked why Obama is doing so well in the polls, he says simply that everyone keeps saying Obama’s policies have failed, but they aren’t articulating why. Which is what he says Romney needs to do. Watch:

Sometimes when you peruse the headlines online, you have to wonder what Barack Obama is really thinking. Is he really that obtuse about green energy and it’s impact on America?

Hard sales numbers will not be available for a week but the rankings on Amazon and Barnes & Noble provide a good indication of consumer interest. The Rogue is ranked in the fifties on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Deer in the Headlights is hovering in the seven hundreds on Amazon and in the two hundreds on Barnes & Noble.

A noted psychologist told a gathering of teachers, school officials and parents that the reason why black males are struggling to graduate high school has very little to do with the failures of teachers. It has much more to do with the failures of modern society, he said. "I'm unwilling to stand up here and pretend that you are somehow responsible for their failures," Na'im Akbar told teachers Tuesday at a symposium on graduation rates at Atlantic Community High School. The symposium was the second meeting of a task force started by the school district to generate ideas to improve...